Do increases in government spending increase or decrease the number of jobs?

Conventional wisdom is they will increase jobs, and a few left-wing economists, such as Paul Krugman of the New York Times, frequently are trotted out by reckless politicians and some in the news media to argue that we need more government spending in order to create jobs.

If this were true, we should be able to see it in the historical evidence, so let's look at the numbers.

Government spending grows each year, but what is relevant is whether it is increasing or decreasing as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) and how it relates to the percentage of the adult labor force at work. As can be seen in the chart below , since 1929 there is an inverse relationship between increasing the size of government and job creation.

Who are the most unpleasant people on the internet? Obviously with so much competition, it is, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, like arguing the toss between lice and fleas. Disability rights activists would be a strong contender.  Thanks to them, money which could go to the genuinely needy is instead being hijacked by scroungers and fakes.

Yet this doesn't just apply to disability rights, of course. It applies to almost everything in the political domain. Pick any issue - the environment, education, healthcare, the economy - and time and again you'll find the agenda has been successfully hijacked by a handful of zealots who are not remotely representative of the broader public interest.

Why? Because politicians will do almost anything for a quiet life and find it much easier to buy off noisy troublemakers by capitulating to their demands, however unreasonable, than to take a principled stand.

Also, of course, it's much, much easier for a lobby group to make a powerful, emotive case for more government spending on its favorite deserving cause than it is for the government to explain why it can't afford it.

I don't know about you lot, but I've had just about enough of this apathy, ignorance, purblind denialism and culpable dishonesty.

The financial crisis in Europe has resulted in the appointment of new prime ministers in both Greece and Italy, by in reality the Germans and French, rather than through the ballot box in Greece and Italy. This raises the question, "Is it possible to have both a bureaucratic welfare state and a democracy that protects individual liberties?"

In the United States, as well as most other countries, the people are increasingly governed and regulated by unelected bureaucrats who create "administrative law."

The rise of the Bureaucratic State, at least in the U.S., is only about 80 years old. The number of federal employees grew slowly over the first hundred years of the American Republic so by the time of the first Grover Cleveland administration in the 1880s, there were still fewer than 100,000 federal civilian employees. By 1925, the number had grown to about a half a million, and now there are almost 3 million civilian federal government employees, plus another 17 million state and local government employees.

There are two fundamental reasons for this trend:

Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction.

This possibility was first suspected in 1985 by Charles Keeling, the scientist whose meticulous record of the content of the air atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii first alerted the world to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Mr. Keeling's famous curve showed not only a year-by-year increase in carbon dioxide levels but a season-by-season oscillation in the concentration.

The latest and most detailed satellite data, which is yet to be published but was summarized in an online lecture last July by Ranga Myneni of Boston University, confirms that the greening of the Earth has now been going on for 30 years. Between 1982 and 2011, 20.5% of the world's vegetated area got greener, while just 3% grew browner; the rest showed no change.

What explains this trend? Man-made nitrogen fertilizer causes crops to grow faster, but it is having little effect on forests. There are essentially two possibilities: climate and carbon dioxide itself. Warmer, wetter weather should cause more vegetation to grow. But even without warming, an increase in carbon dioxide should itself accelerate growth rates of plants.

CO2 is a scarce resource that plants have trouble scavenging from the air, and plants grow faster with higher levels of CO2 to inhale.